In today's information-driven society, organizations are collecting and accumulating more data than ever before. Managing the huge amounts of resulting data is both expensive and complicated. In practice, the data stored is of different value or importance to the organization. If each data object, such as a file, were to be managed in accordance with its value to the organization, the cost and complexity of managing the data would be significantly reduced. Such an approach is generally known as information lifecycle management (ILM).
The key challenge in ILM lies in determining the value of the objects. Traditional Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) approaches rely on the access history of an object to infer how likely the object will be used in the future but this is not very effective, especially for large archival systems where the accesses do not exhibit much locality of reference. Another proposal is to have the user or some other external entity, such as an associated business process, assign a value to the object. The external entity, however, typically has neither such knowledge nor the wherewithal to perform the assignment.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for effectively determining the importance and valuation of a data object, such as a file, and for managing the object according to its determined importance.